IRAQ

Congressman Emmanuel is difficult to refute.

ON OCT. 3, 1993, an American helicopter was shot down in Somalia. Efforts to rescue the downed pilots went terribly wrong, and 18 Americans were killed. It was a humiliating incident for the world's most powerful nation. It also devastated 18 American families. When President Clinton was told that his commanders on the ground had requested more troops but had been ignored by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Clinton acted decisively and fired him. Throughout U.S. history, presidents have sacked military leaders who failed them. Lincoln went through six generals before settling on Grant. Patton was passed over for promotion by Roosevelt. Truman fired MacArthur. President Bush has chosen a different course. As criticism mounts over the planning and execution of the Iraq war, eight retired generals have come forward in an unprecedented manner to call for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. The president has held firm, stating, "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best." Now, I am no fan of Rumsfeld — in my view he has failed miserably — but the ultimate responsibility for conducting the Iraq war lies above a Cabinet secretary's pay grade. We can be angry at Rumsfeld; frustrated with his flawed judgment. But our frustration is misplaced if it stops there. Bush is right; he, not Rumsfeld, is the decider. And he has decided wrongly, time after time. This president had the responsibility to direct the war but deferred to Rumsfeld. Congress had a constitutional responsibility to oversee the president's actions. Instead, it has spent the last three years on the sidelines, approving every funding request — nearly half a trillion dollars — no questions asked. The glaring mistakes made at every stage of the war were ignored in favor of feel-good speeches about staying the course. The retired generals are taking the unusual step of speaking up because for the last three years the Republican Congress has been silent.The United States has been in Iraq for more than three years. Nearly 2,500 Americans have lost their lives, with nearly 18,000 wounded. The chaos and violence is not subsiding, and what was supposed to be a quick victory has turned into the greatest foreign policy challenge in a generation. There is no doubt that things could and should have been done differently.When it was clear that Iraq was spiraling out of control, the president should have changed commanders. In December 2004, Army Spc. Thomas Wilson asked Rumsfeld, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" It was a good question, one that no Republican in Congress had asked. The Defense secretary answered: "You go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." He should have been fired on the spot for such arrogance and ignorance. Yet the president stood by him, and Congress stood by the president. To date, Congress has held no hearings on the conduct of the war, and Wilson's question remains unanswered. Three years of worsening news have eroded the public's faith in the war. Filling the void created by a lack of leadership and accountability, retired generals began to speak their minds. They had to speak up because no one was listening to the soldiers, because Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibilities and because the president has never once questioned the strategy or the performance of his team. The secretary of Defense has a lot to answer for, but the American people did not elect Donald Rumsfeld. They elected the president and the Congress. The president must be held accountable for deciding to stick with failed leadership — at a tremendous cost to our nation. And this Congress must be held accountable for letting him get away with it. After three years, nearly 2,500 lives and half a trillion dollars, it's clear we went to war with the leadership we had, not the one we needed.

Nice News for Music Lovers

....perhaps there is life in the classic canon after all. from the NYTimes. There are still many of us left.

EVERYONE has heard the requiems sung for classical music or at least the reports of its failing health: that its audience is graying, record sales have shriveled and the cost of live performance is rising as ticket sales decline. Music education has virtually disappeared from public schools. Classical programming has (all but) disappeared from television and radio. And 17 orchestras have closed in the last 20 years.

All this has of late become the subject of countless blogs, news reports, books and symposiums, with classical music partisans furrowing their brows and debating what went wrong, what can still go wrong and whether it's too late to save this once-exalted industry. Moaning about the state of classical music has itself become an industry. But as pervasive as the conventional wisdom is, much of it is based on sketchy data incorrectly interpreted. Were things better in the old days? Has American culture given up on classical music?
The numbers tell a very different story: for all the hand-wringing, there is immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts and on recordings than there was in what nostalgists think of as the golden era of classics in America.
In the record business, for example, it can be depressing to compare the purely classical output of the major labels now with what the industry cranked out from 1950 to 1975. But focusing on the majors is beside the point: the real action has moved to dozens of adventurous smaller companies, ranging from musician-run labels like Bridge, Oxingale and Cantaloupe to ambitious mass marketers like the midprice, repertory-spanning Naxos.
Similarly, someone shopping anywhere but in huge chains like Tower or Virgin might conclude that classical discs are no longer sold. In reality the business model has changed. Internet deep-catalog shops like arkivmusic.com offer virtually any CD in print, something no physical store can do today. The Internet has become a primary resource for classical music: the music itself as well as information about it.
On Apple's iTunes, which sold a billion tracks in its first three years, classical music reportedly accounts for 12 percent of sales, four times its share of the CD market. Both Sony-BMG and Universal say that as their download sales have increased, CD sales have remained steady, suggesting that downloaders are a new market, not simply the same consumers switching formats.
In their first six weeks on iTunes, the New York Philharmonic's download-only Mozart concert sold 2,000 complete copies and about 1,000 individual tracks, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's two Minimalist concerts, combined, sold 900 copies and about 400 individual tracks. Those numbers, though small by pop standards, exceed what might be expected from sales of orchestral music on standard CD's.
Other orchestras are catching on: the Milwaukee Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque in San Francisco offer downloads on their own Web sites. And the major labels are planning to sell downloads of archival recordings that will not be reissued on CD.
In concert halls, season subscriptions have plummeted in favor of last-minute ticket sales. That doesn't mean the business is tanking, however, just that audiences have shifted their habits. As two-income families have grown busier, potential ticket buyers are less inclined to commit to performances months in advance (or as ticket prices climb, to accept predetermined concert packages). But as much as orchestras and concert presenters would prefer to sell their tickets before the season starts, the seats are hardly empty.
Neither are the stages. The American Symphony Orchestra League puts the number of orchestras in the United States at 1,800 (350 of them professional). The 1,800 ensembles give about 36,000 concerts a year, 30 percent more than in 1994. And in the most recent season for which the league has published figures, 2003-4, orchestras reported an 8 percent increase in operating revenues against a 7 percent increase in expenses, with deficits dropping to 1.1 percent from 2.7 percent of their annual budgets from the previous season.
Meanwhile corners of the field generally ignored in discussions of classical music's mortality — most notably, early music and new music — are true growth industries. When Lincoln Center presented a 10-concert celebration of the composer Osvaldo Golijov this season, there wasn't a spare ticket to be found. The Miller Theater's Gyorgy Ligeti series packed them in as well. And though the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Minimalist Jukebox festival sold slightly fewer tickets than its regular programming, it drew a younger crowd: 25 percent of the audience was said to be under 45 (compared with 15 percent normally), and 10 percent was 25 to 34 (compared with 2 percent).
By relying heavily on contemporary programs and concerts of Renaissance and Baroque works, Miller has achieved an 84 percent increase in ticket sales since 2002, and this season's box office receipts have exceeded last season's by $100,000.
Zankel Hall, the newly built, high-tech, adventurously programmed addition to Carnegie Hall, has produced a steady increase in sold-out houses, from 57 percent of its concerts in 2003-4 (its first season) to 63 percent in the first third of the current season. At Carnegie's main hall and its smaller Weill Recital Hall, ticket sales have been fairly steady since 1982, with 565,000 tickets sold in a slow year and 635,000 in an exceptional one (most recently 2003).
The classical music world has even found a silver lining in the reports about its imminent death. Fund-raising letters now allude to classical music's parlous state as a way of shaking larger donations from supporters. And when EMI needed a marketing hook for Plácido Domingo's "Tristan und Isolde," it jumped on predictions that it would be the last studio recording of an opera.
Finally, concert halls are sprouting like mushrooms. New symphony halls are about to open in Miami, Nashville and Costa Mesa, Calif. (not far from the newly opened Disney Hall in Los Angeles), and Toronto is opening a new opera house in September. Clearly, someone sees a future for this music.
UNDERLYING many of the jeremiads is what might be called golden ageism: the belief, bordering on an article of faith, that everything was better, both artistically and commercially, in the relatively recent past.
To a degree, the golden ageists have a point. From the 1920's through the 70's, classical music was plentiful on the radio and on nascent television. Variety shows like "The Bell Telephone Hour" and "The Ed Sullivan Show" presented both top names and newcomers, and networks offered symphony concerts, opera and seductive introductory shows like Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" in prime time.
There was a vogue for films built around classical music and musicians as well: "100 Men and a Girl," with Leopold Stokowski (1937), and "They Shall Have Music," with Jascha Heifetz (1939); "Humoresque," with Isaac Stern on its soundtrack (1946); biographical films like "Rhapsody in Blue" (1945); and extravaganzas like "Fantasia" (1940).
All this made classical music's reigning stars — from Toscanini to Bernstein, from Heifetz to Stern, from Horowitz to Van Cliburn — household names in a way that only Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and Yo-Yo Ma are now.
But the disappearance of this exposure is hardly a lethal wound. Though classical radio stations have become scarce in most cities, the Internet offers a global radio dial. The Internet radio audience is said to be small at the moment, but people who want it will find it. When the BBC offered a Beethoven symphony cycle as a free download last year, 1.4 million people took up the offer. And if classical music is now scarce on television, with even PBS cutting back, DVD labels are pouring out everything from long-forgotten TV performances to newly produced symphonic, chamber and recital discs.
The golden age of concertgoing, meanwhile, is at least partly a matter of idealized memory. Organizations did not collect demographic information then, but musicians and critics who attended concerts during those years remember the audience as always middle-aged (and concert videos bear out those memories). And despite the music's greater visibility in daily life, it was a niche market even then. The pianist Gary Graffman said recently that when he began attending New York Philharmonic concerts at Carnegie Hall in the 1940's and 50's empty seats were plentiful. And among the great soloists, he added, only Heifetz, Rubinstein and Horowitz could expect to sell out Carnegie Hall.
At the time Carnegie was undisputedly the city's premier hall, with Town Hall, Hunter College and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the principal chamber music and recital halls. Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill) and the Frick Collection offered chamber concerts as well, and McMillin (now Miller) Theater at Columbia University was a hot spot for new music. When Lincoln Center was planned in the late 1950's, Carnegie Hall narrowly escaped the wrecker's ball. It was thought, however briefly, that two large halls were an extravagance New York didn't need and couldn't sustain.
Consider how things have changed since Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall opened in 1962. Carnegie, until then a rental hall, began doing its own presentations, and it now offers about 200 concerts a year. Lincoln Center — with its two opera houses, Avery Fisher Hall for orchestras and star-turn recitals and Alice Tully Hall (opened in 1969) for chamber music — quickly undertook its own presentations as well: some 400 annually now, extending to halls and churches beyond its campus.
The 92nd Street Y revived its long-dormant concert series in 1974, and Merkin Concert Hall went up in 1978. Carnegie added Zankel Hall in 2003, and Lincoln Center opened the Rose Theater and the Allen Room — intended mostly for jazz but sometimes used for new-music concerts — in 2004.
Meanwhile the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection remained committed to classical concerts. Small- to medium-size halls at the French Institute/Alliance Française, Scandinavia House and the Austrian Cultural Forum have opened since the late 1980's. And the Morgan Library and Museum opened a new chamber music hall this month.
That's in Manhattan. Just across the rivers, the same period brought a revival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the construction of the Tilles Center on Long Island and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark and the advent of small but successful enterprises like Bargemusic.
In the deficit column? Town Hall and Hunter College have largely abandoned classical music, although each offers a handful of concerts. But apart from the old Metropolitan Opera House, demolished when the Met moved to Lincoln Center, no halls have closed in New York since Lincoln Center opened.
The concert world has expanded in other ways too. Through the 1950's the music season ran less than 30 weeks. But in 1964 the New York Philharmonic negotiated a 52-week contract with its players. Other orchestras quickly followed suit, and the season grew longer. The Mostly Mozart Festival cropped up in 1966 and spawned similar series around the country. And in 1967 the Ford Foundation began giving orchestras grants for even greater expansion, in most cases, more concerts each week.
The nightly offerings in classical music are immensely more plentiful and varied now than during the supposed golden age. The wonder isn't that audiences fluctuate from night to night or that empty seats can be spotted. It's that so much competition can be sustained in a field usually portrayed as moribund.
One way to keep the gloomy reports in perspective is to understand that the rumored death of classical music has been with us for a very long time.
The Metropolitan Opera was in almost constant financial peril between 1929 and 1944, and there were dicey moments in the 70's. The orchestra world's 1960's expansion caused anxiety as well. In an essay in The New York Times on Sept. 3, 1967, "Do We Have Too Much Music in America?," John O. Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, worried that the audience was insufficient to support the blossoming 52-week orchestra contracts.
Those worries were soon born out. In "Dip in Concert Audiences Troubles Impresarios" (Dec. 21, 1968), The Times reported that classical music ticket sales had dropped as much as 40 percent. The reasons included everything from the distractions of television and recordings to street crime, parking difficulties and high ticket prices, meaning a $15 top at the Met and "as much as $8.80" for "other prestige events." Young people reading these reports would have had little reason to expect the classical music world to exist in 2006. But now that those same people have begun "graying," are they joining it? Demographic information over the couple of decades institutions have been collecting it suggests that they are. For whatever reasons — changes in taste, a desire to expand their musical experiences, a lack of interest in current pop — middle-aged listeners continue to join the audience. And the generational shift is coloring both programming and performance.
Listeners now in their 50's — the core classical audience — were the baby boomers who grew up in the 1960's and 70's. For those already interested in classical music during their student years, Shostakovich, Ives and Mahler were musical obsessions, and the early-music boom was a campus phenomenon. All that music, marginal in the 70's, joined the mainstream as those listeners became performers and ticket buyers.
Classically inclined boomers were also new-music agnostics, at home with the rigorous atonality of the previous generation but also open to a trippy avant-garde scene that ran from Cage to the Minimalists. That has had a telling effect too: witness the standing ovations Elliott Carter's music now gets at symphony concerts and the rock-star popularity of John Adams and Philip Glass.
At the same time this generation's fascination with pop has influenced its composers (and younger ones), who draw on the energy of rock. They have also left behind their elders' bias against amplification and sound processing, which they use not simply to increase the volume but also to expand their palettes of timbre. A fascination with world music, which also has roots in the 1960's, has stretched those palettes further.
All this is changing the classical repertory, and to judge from the comparatively young audiences to be seen at concerts by daring groups like the Kronos Quartet and Alarm Will Sound, it is more likely to rejuvenate classical music than kill it.
Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" observation about relationships and sharks — that both must either move forward or die — also works for culture. In classical music, lots of people really just want the dead shark. They pine for the days when Bernstein, Reiner, Szell and Toscanini stood on the podium, with Heifetz fiddling, Horowitz at the piano and Callas and Tebaldi locked in a perpetual diva war. Most of all they want their repertory dials set between 1785 and 1920.
You can send those people your condolences.
For the rest of us, the shark is still moving. We're getting our revivals of Machaut and Rameau along with vigorous reconsiderations of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler and a varied gallery of contemporary composers. We may be hearing much of this in small, high-tech halls instead of cavernous temples of the arts or finding it online instead of in shops or on the radio. But it's all there, constantly renewing itself. You just have to grab onto the dorsal fin.

Garrison Keillor

I am a tremendous admirer of Garrison Keillor. He seems to embody so much of what is the fundamental goodness of Americans. Therefore, I am truly looking forward to the film version of PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION. Here is a pre-release review from the LATimes...the film goes into general release on June 9.

For 30 years, Garrison Keillor has spent his Saturday nights putting on an old-fashioned radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," the live variety program heard nationwide by 4 million listeners. But while building an institution by raising Midwestern self-deprecation and subversively folksy tongue-in-cheek storytelling to an art form, he's been harboring celluloid dreams — which is how his base at the Fitzgerald Theater was transformed last summer into the set of Robert Altman's latest film, "A Prairie Home Companion," opening June 9."This has been my ambition for years, to write for a dramatic medium," Keillor said. "Because I'm no good at it, and one aspires to do what one cannot do. I still have a hard time writing dialogue, because I come from people who didn't talk. We sat and chewed our food, looked out the window."

Keillor originally approached Altman with the idea of making a movie based on the characters of Lake Wobegon, the mythical Minnesota town where much of his storytelling is based, after a development deal at Disney fell apart. But after Altman and his wife, Katherine, a longtime Keillor fan, attended a live taping of "A Prairie Home Companion" on one of its regular tours across the country (it'll be at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday), the 81-year-old Altman decided that he'd rather make a movie about the onstage drama and backstage dynamics surrounding the making of a radio show. As he did in his last film, "The Company" (2003), a faux documentary about a season in the life of a troupe modeled after Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, Altman wanted to immortalize an ephemeral art form on screen.So Keillor, 63, imagined a last night in the life of a program much like his own, "turning the show inside out" by writing a scenario based on real and imagined "Prairie Home Companion" personalities. Writing a fictional documentary about himself was, Keillor said, "an odd assignment. But I was intrigued by the idea. And I was 60 years old. When you're 60, you kind of think to yourself, 'This chance may not come again.' "Regulars Sue Scott and Tim Russell play a fictional makeup artist and a stage manager, respectively. Regular chanteuse Jearlyn Steele plays herself. Dusty and Lefty, the singing cowboys — character sketches incarnated on the radio by Keillor himself — are reborn in the hilarious duo of Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly. "Prairie Home Companion" icon Guy Noir is now the theater's hapless security guard, played by Kevin Kline in 1940s attire. And central to the story are country music sisters Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) and Yolanda's daughter, Lola (Lindsay Lohan). The show's live audiences were replaced here by local volunteers.All but two scenes were shot inside the Fitzgerald, which had been only lightly art-directed for its screen debut."The whole movie is inside — this is all in Keillor's mind," Altman said on a shooting break, sitting in a golf cart on the sidewalk outside the stage door that served as his way station in the 97-degree heat. "This has gotta be his humor, his tempo. I can't make up my own jokes. This is really about Garrison Keillor and his sense of humanity and his sensibility and his politics. All I'm doing is coming in and interpreting it. This guy's been in charge for 30 years. He has never, ever not been fully in charge of everything, except this movie. I have to see that he is in charge.""No, he's the master of this world," Keillor insisted later from a glass-encased VIP lounge at the back of the theater that had been built by the art department for a scene in which Tommy Lee Jones — playing a broadcasting executive — comes to shut down the show. "Bob has an amazing, specific vision. He's here painting his picture with some materials that I've provided. But he has the upper hand and so, you know, that's good to know, so we don't have to fight. We know who makes the final cut."This was how two of America's most singular voices found a common language, each calling the other one boss and going about his work. "They're two great forces coexisting," said Richard Dworksy, the house music director, who improvises onstage while Keillor performs, and a local boy whose parents owned the theater until 1983. "There's very courteous diplomacy going on.""Keillor and Altman are a real natural combination," said Reilly, still in cowboy get-up. "There's something similar in the fabric of 'Prairie Home Companion' and some of the more well-known Altman movies — where there's a group of people, one comes in, one comes out and there's humor in it that's based on the acceptance of humanity and all its flaws and eccentricities. There's a kind of guiding ethic to the way they do the show, but it's also sort of chaotic. And that's very much Bob's sense of 'What are we gonna do? We're gonna find what happens in that moment and I'm gonna capture it and it won't be pushed or forced until the life goes out of it.' "*Creator's licenseKEILLOR is known for rewriting right up until airtime, and much of the shoot involved Altman allowing him to hold forth from his stage, loomingly tall, in red tie and sneakers, while the house band jammed behind him and he and a rotating crew sang songs and jingles, told jokes and stories from the American heartland."Let's come in here now with a word about catchup," Keillor said in his homespun voice, delivering a service announcement for the fictional Catchup Advisory Board. "Yes, catchup — made from tomatoes that contain natural sunshine, which we need in this part of the country…. We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle — and if you should ever feel really happy, be patient — this will pass."Then Altman yelled "Cut!" from the back of the theater. "That was great, Garrison," he said. "Let's try that one more time." Keillor improvised another take."I'm a writer, and there are times when I'm very proprietary about what I have written," Keillor said. "But there are scenes which, although I did write them, I'm glad to see them kind of smudged. Bob's very good at smudging. So the dialogue is kind of overlapping and a lot of things are going on and your sentences are kind of set into a flow of things that is actually a good fate for them. Had they been spoken like lines from Shakespeare, everyone would have seen that it wasn't Shakespeare."Keillor has spoofed himself in the bumbling alter ego of G.K. "I am not playing myself exactly," he said, adding that his Hollywood dreams did not include acting. "Well, I mean I went along with it, but I certainly tried to get out of it. My hope was to write words that other people could say, and then I could sit in the dark and watch them. I wanted somebody else to play me."Who, exactly?"Well, George Clooney, of course," he said. "I couldn't really give myself much to do in the screenplay, knowing what little I was capable of — I couldn't have myself fall down the stairs, or burst into tears. We shot a scene and Lindsay was weeping. She did something to herself that produced tears. I wouldn't know how to do it. I don't cry in real life so how would I do it in a movie?"The local press had its knickers in a bit of a twist about the celebrity onslaught, reporting Streep sightings in the Marshall Field's and the restaurant habits of the cast. But not even the presence of tabloid staple Lohan did much to disturb life in the quiet city of F. Scott Fitzgerald's birth. Downtown, Starbucks opens at 5:30 in the morning and closes by 6 p.m. and solitary homeless people drift like tumbleweeds down empty sidewalks. On St. Peter Street one evening at twilight, the only other living creature on the sidewalk was a rabbit.But Mickey's Diner at 7th and St. Peter is always open, and the filmmakers couldn't resist using the camera-ready 1930s greasy spoon as a location. "It was an Edward Hopper scene," Keillor said of one shot where Kline sits alone at the counter. "When I saw what a beautiful shot Bob made over at Mickey's, I started to think maybe I'd made a big mistake in locking him up in this building."Keillor had finished shooting for the day and changed into jeans, which did little to lend him a casual air. For all the coziness of his on-air persona, there is an awkwardness about his person — his stature makes it hard for most people to look him in the eyes, and he seems never to slip out of character.The extras had gone home and Altman's director's chair had been moved onto the stage for a scene in the wings with Kline and Virginia Madsen (here as a dark angel in a white trench coat, haunting the wings). "I can't remember what prompted this, but in an early stage of development, Bob said, 'The death of an old man is not a tragedy,' " Keillor remembered. "I don't think he was referring to himself. But that just stuck with me. I asked for permission to write an angel into the script, and he gave it on the condition that there be no aura.""Look at that — that's a picture," Keillor continued in a confidential hush, deflecting attention to the white-haired Altman, a pale, distant figure in the Caravaggio-esque house light, surrounded by silhouettes of the crew. "He's in his own world up there — the world of moviemaking. To the extent that I'm responsible for giving him something to work on that he's really enthused about, I feel as if I've done a good deed in a dark world."One night after shooting, Altman gathered a nonexclusive mob of cast, crew, family and friends for wine, beer, pizza and a glimpse of the work in progress — an Altman tradition. On-screen, Harrelson and Reilly did a musical bad joke routine, Streep and Tomlin sang sweetly, Kline became the flesh and blood of Guy Noir, and through Altman's lens Keillor was both his oddly charming self and a suddenly probable leading man.Scenes from this meditation on little guys and big corporations, God and country, the passing of time and the end of an era — in which the angel of death is a femme fatale, dangerous and beautiful and never far — were rendered all the more poignant by the specter of Altman himself, looking finally mortal in his ninth decade on Earth.Those assembled laughed and cheered and burst into spontaneous applause, and tears. The lights went up and Altman looked around with the stricken air of someone who wasn't taking anything for granted."I needed a story, and that seemed to me to be the most honest story," Keillor said, pointing out that his own show died once in 1987 before being resurrected a few years later."So there is some aspect of truth to this. Every show does come to an end."

THE TERROR

I always remember that famous remark of Chou En Lai, when asked his views on the French Revolution, remarked that it was too soon to tell. Here, Adam Gopnick from the New Yorker, weighs in on the terror.

Revisionism in history knows no boundaries. Just in the past few years, we have been told that that comet may have glanced right off the dinosaurs, prodding a few toward flight and feathers; that the German blitzkrieg barely meandered across Europe; and that Genghis Khan was actually a sharing and caring and ecumenical leader, Bill Moyers with a mustache and colorful folk costume. So it was inevitable that we would get a revisionist history of the French Reign of Terror—the period from September, 1793, to July, 1794, when the Committee of Public Safety, in Paris, invented the modern thought crime, cut off the heads of its enemies, and created the apparatus of the totalitarian state. Since the time of Burke, through Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution and, above all, Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities,” the imagery of the Terror—of the sansculottes knitting as tumbrels rolled—has been lodged deep in our imagination. “All perished, all , Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks, Head after head, and never heads enough For those who bade them fall,” Wordsworth wrote, in disillusioned horror, after it was over; and we see the heads falling still.
Yet our sense of such an iconic moment is bound to be partial—icons are flat. The real question about revisionist history is whether it turns something flat into something three-dimensional or just hangs it on the wall upside down. This revisionist history, now that it has crossed the Atlantic, turns out to be subtler and more interesting than some of the British reviews might have suggested. Written by the academic historian David Andress, the new book is called “The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26), and the subtitle emphatically semaphores the new position. Andress is hardly an apologist for the Reign of Terror, and he is both too smart and too decent to scant its horrors. But he is in battle with the now standard view, which was entrenched by the French historian François Furet in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, and made most memorable and dramatic by Simon Schama in his 1990 book “Citizens.” This is the view not that the Revolution mutated into the Terror by contingency and ill luck but that in some tragic sense the Revolution was the Terror: that the Terror was implicit in the entire rationalist program of starting over from Year One. The first necessity for a blank slate is an omnipotent eraser, and the guillotine was the one at hand.
Against this, Andress believes that the Terror was an episode in a sporadic civil war that stretched from 1789 to 1871—a bloody and ugly episode, certainly, but no bloodier and not much uglier than others that we write about less often. (Far fewer people were killed by the guillotine than in the Napoleonic battles of Austerlitz and Borodino.) More important, Andress sets out to demonstrate, the Terror was also a consequence of the reactionary encirclement of France by the other powers of Europe. Those powers had learned nothing and forgotten nothing; they had it in for Republican France, and intended to restore a vengeful absolutism to the throne. What drove the Terror was not a crazed intellectual desire to extend the Revolution to every corner of existence but a desperate desire to maintain its achievements in the face of opposition. Robespierre and his group were revolutionary butchers, but they were butchers surrounded by vampires. “It is necessary to maintain a sense of proportion,” Andress writes in his introduction.
Well, what was the Terror? What are we to be proportionate about? It was, in effect, the second, panicked stage of the French Revolution. Like the American one, the French Revolution proceeded in stages, from appeals to the King to the rejection of him. Despite its subsequent reputation as a killing spree, it actually advanced more cautiously than the English one, more than a century before, which had also—as the British sometimes forget—culminated in regicide and massacre. Andress writes as crisp and up-to-date an account of the Revolution’s origins as I have read. He explains how the financial crisis of the French treasury precipitated a political crisis, and how the slow stirrings of constitutional reform blossomed into a demand for fundamental change—in particular, the demand for the Third Estate, the common people, to have a role in governance. Yet Andress also underlines the fact that, throughout these first stages, what was wanted by the great mass of statesmen and by the National Assembly—the makeshift but representative gathering of the people who had declared the Rights of Man—was a constitutional monarchy along British lines.
It was the secret flight of the King’s family from their palace in Paris to Varennes on the night of June 22, 1791, that precipitated the Terror. The weak and well-meaning King Louis XVI (who had taken up locksmithing, out of a belief in the virtues of “useful” craft and trade) got talked into fleeing toward the border of the Austrian Netherlands, where loyalist troops waited. Andress places some of the blame for this folly on the queen, Marie-Antoinette, who, true to her popular reputation, could not accept that things had changed or see that a monarchy non-absolute in power would be better off in the long run. The King’s flight was a galvanizing event for the revolutionary radicals in Paris; it at once vindicated their fears and justified their excesses.
Again and again, though, Andress leaves Paris and the familiar characters to delve into regional politics and economics. He is a member of what might be called the prices-in-the-provinces school of academic history, a practice that emphasizes events outside the capital and makes much of weekly economic fluctuations; what was spent for bread in Lyons, not what was said over coffee in Paris, shaped the course of events. Throughout the Terror, he points out, far more revolutionary bureaucrats were engaged in intricate and doomed bakery price-control schemes than were working the guillotine. He gives names and jobs to all the players in the tragedy, not in order to make heroes of individual agents but to replace the blood-maddened mobs of the Burkean imagination with actual groups and guilds and clan gatherings. Andress is at pains to demythologize the horrors these revolutionaries committed, which he does, sort of, making it plain that they were not mindlessly bloodthirsty but selective and, in their way, sane. One of the early rumblings of the Terror—the massacre of aristocrats and clerics in Paris in September, 1792—was in fact quite well regulated. The killings were semi-legal, with kangaroo courts quickly convened and a majority of the harmless prisoners released. And some of the worst horrors have been made worse still by time and legend. It turns out that Marie-Antoinette’s friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who, according to long-established history, was murdered by the September mob, her naked body pierced and mutilated, was merely decapitated, and her fully clothed body brought directly to the police station, where—a very French touch, this—“within hours, corpse and head were reunited.” This is some comfort, but perhaps not quite as much comfort as Andress thinks, either to the Princesse or to us.
The Committee of Public Safety— one of the first great Orwellian euphemisms—was formed to bring the massacres under control, or, as it turned out, to centralize, rationalize, and mechanize them. By then, the Convention (the successor of the National Assembly) had turned from its more or less orderly and bourgeois phase into a gathering of radical clans, who met every day in a former church to argue, drink, speechify, and accuse. It was as if S.D.S. had seized power in Washington in 1968 and Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda, and two or three ambitious renegade generals were all suddenly trying to run the country, while their followers smoked pot and played Jefferson Airplane records, oscillating between a vague, messianic utopianism and a baleful, apocalyptic vengefulness.
The drift toward absolute radicalism was dictated by the circumstances. In an ordinary political meeting, the action is bowl-shaped: everything flows toward the center. In a revolutionary meeting, the terrain is cambered, and everything flows toward the extreme right or the extreme left. Either a general or a fanatic was almost certain to prevail in those circumstances—a man with guns or a man who could hypnotize the men with guns.
The man to emerge was Maximilien Robespierre, who led the drive to decapitate the King, and became the chief magistrate of the Terror. Robespierre’s life is the subject of “Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution” (Metropolitan; $30), by Ruth Scurr, a youngish scholar who teaches at Cambridge. A more conventional account of the intersection of a single life and time than Andress’s book, “Fatal Purity” is in its way just as rewarding, because of what Robespierre represents: the ascent of the mass-murdering nerd—a man who, having read a book, resolves to kill all the people who don’t like it as much as he does. There is a case to be made that the real singularity of the Terror was the first appearance on the stage of history of this particular psychological type: not the tight-lipped inquisitor, alight with religious rage, but the small, fastidious intellectual, the man with an idea, the prototype of Lenin listening to his Beethoven as the Cheka begins its purges. In normal times, such men become college professors, or book reviewers or bloggers. It takes special historical circumstances for them to become killers: the removal of a ruling class without its replacement by a credible new one. In the confusion, their ethereal certainties look like the only solid thing to build on.
Robespierre, Scurr explains, was a provincial lawyer, well-educated and prim—he had been a scholarship boy at the excellent Collège Louis-le-Grand. After virtuous years in the provinces as a lawyer, often pleading against unjust convictions of the old regime, he arrived in Paris as the Revolution was beginning. He became a leader among the Jacobins, the radical group who met in a Dominican monastery associated with the Rue Saint-Jacques, which gave them their name, and who were in conflict with the Girondins, the Menshevik-like moderates, many of whom came from the area of the Gironde, around Bordeaux.
Bourgeois in manners and personal morals, Robespierre soon became the leader of the Montagnards—the Mountaineers, so-called because they took seats high up in the Convention assembly. He became a leader through negative force, and through the ascetic reputation that gave him the nickname “the Incorruptible.” At the height of the Terror, he still lodged with a respectable working-class family, the Duplays, who made sure that there was white bread and jam for their beloved boarder, and oranges to aid his digestion. He flirted, but only flirted, with the Duplay daughters. He chose a life of unspectacular rectitude. He loved to read, and it was said that he slept with a copy of Rousseau’s “Social Contract” under his pillow. Unlike his great, loose-living and loud-talking rival Danton, he was too unimaginative to be personally ambitious in an obvious way. Instead, he was a devotee of the idea of vertu—virtue, though the French word conveys the kind of encompassing gravity of purpose that used to be suggested by the phrase “moral seriousness.” He never forgave Danton for joking that vertu was what Danton showed his wife every night.
The fact that no one was naturally inclined to follow him made him the man left standing after all the obvious leaders had worn themselves out shouting. Jean Anouilh, in “Poor Bitos,” a now forgotten play from the nineteen-fifties, tried to draw the character: grave, charmless, touchy, proud, easily mocked, and just as easily, and murderously, offended. It is a type who could almost be mistaken for a secularized version of the religious inquisitor, burning heretics not out of hatred but out of love for the higher cause. But Torquemada and the other inquisitors were full-time fanatics who would modestly admit to the description. Robespierre and his closest collaborators were, in their own view, not fanatics but men of feeling and mind; they just happened to be right, that’s all, and what was one to do with the people who insisted that they weren’t?
Robespierre and his chief aide, the eloquent Saint-Just, made regicide seem not just necessary but noble. As Scurr sees it, their joint obsession with vertu set them apart from their more pragmatic contemporaries. By being the keenest voice for the execution of the King, and by pitching that plea in a tone not of personal vengeance but of the necessary work of the Revolution, Robespierre came to dominate. His tone was reflective and ideological rather than vicious or overwrought. The King, sadly, had to die for the sake of the Revolution—the true Revolution, which must be built on terror because it could not be compromised. In a speech, he later explained:
If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs. . . . Indulgence for the royalists, cry certain men, mercy for the villains! No! Mercy for the innocent, mercy for the weak, mercy for the unfortunate, mercy for humanity.
The tones of a new kind of abstract absolutism echo. Even the Inquisitor, on the whole, assumed that the majority of his subjects were true believers; heretics were always a minority—a diabolical minority, but a minority still. For Robespierre, the Revolution exists outside the virtuous revolutionaries, outside history, as a transcendent shimmering ideal to be served; anyone can be an enemy of the revolution, and it is possible for the enemies to outnumber the revolutionaries.
This note of mad spiritual striving rings out in all his words, and both Scurr and Andress make it plain that, whatever else he may have been, Robespierre was never a rationalist. He was a Romantic, and, specifically, a religious Romantic. It was Rousseau’s vision of the workings of a mystical general will, not Voltaire’s vision of toleration achieved through popular education, that moved him. “Robespierre in particular believed fervently that outright atheism was a trait spawned in the decadence of the aristocratic salons of the Old Regime,” Andress writes. He opposed “dechristianization” and the persecution of priests. The national crisis could be solved not by reason but only by faith and tradition. At the height of his power, he organized, with pride, a vast Festival of the Supreme Being, where an effigy of atheism was set alight and burned to the ground as the crowd and choirs sang. He had spoken before of his belief in an “Eternal Being who intimately affects the destinies of nations and who seems to me personally to watch over the French Revolution in a very special way.” Far from marking the extreme limits of secular reason, the Terror was a faith-based initiative, the guillotine the instrument of another kind of auto-da-fé. The Terror wasn’t mad science; it was new faith.
Both Scurr and Andress grimly track the course of the next eighteen months, as Robespierre, holding various posts, oversaw the execution of almost two thousand men and women in the Place de la Révolution. Trials were held in which no defense witnesses were called and the jury had only to be persuaded that there was “moral proof” of the accused’s opposition to the Revolution. After Marie-Antoinette, her hair gone white with worry, was sentenced to death, the radical Hébert, whose “Père Duchesne” letters had set a new high for obscenity in a revolutionary cause, exulted at “having with his own eyes seen the head of the female veto separated from her fucking tart’s neck.”
But soon enough it was Hébert’s turn, and he was guillotined for being an ultra, a “false revolutionary,” in Robespierre’s words, “who would prefer to wear out one hundred red caps”—once a symbol of radicalism—“than do one good deed.” (Andress tells us that the executioner waved a red cap “under his nose as he lay helplessly screaming beneath the waiting blade.”) Then the moderates went, led by Danton, whose coarse joke to Robespierre became part of his indictment. Andress recounts, succinctly, the feuds and rivalries among the bewildering sects and sub-sects of the revolutionaries, and does a good job of dealing with the Terror outside Paris. (Some of the worst atrocities happened in the provinces, where counter-revolutionaries were lined up and executed by having grapeshot fired at them en masse, with hideous inefficiency.) He also points out that the fear of counter-revolution that was always the Jacobin rhetorical trump card wasn’t without warrant; revolutionary France was a fear state but not yet a true police state, and spies and agents did come in and out of Paris with paranoia-inducing regularity.
This sense of beleaguerment helps explain a central mystery of the Terror regime: not how the ideologues kept their hold on the other ideologues but how, despite obvious signs of looniness, they kept their hold on the apparatus of power, on the army and the police. The modern method has usually been for the party or the dictator to have a private source of organized violence, Cheka or S.S., more ruthless than the normal ones. But the Jacobins had no militia or secret police. Andress suggests that, heartbreakingly, an idea of legitimacy, however warped, still seemed to move the French people. The Convention was the accepted source of authority, and soldiers and executioners alike followed its orders to a remarkable degree and accepted its rules and decisions, even as the Revolution turned on the revolutionaries.
The Terror was sadistic and it was cruel. The guillotine may have been a more “humane” form of death than the drawing and quartering of the ancien régime, but its rituals were not. Its victims, robbed even of minimal dignity, were forced to travel to their deaths in open carts, and then laid on planks and decapitated, as the crowd cheered and the blood sprayed and the heads, capable of expression only seconds before, were held up, usually frozen in a grimace. Whole families were killed, one by one, and forced to watch as each went to the scaffold; the aged Malesherbes, who had bravely campaigned for civil liberties under the old regime, had to witness his daughter and granddaughter and their husbands die before it was his turn.
It is often said that terror of this kind is possible only when one has first “dehumanized” some group of people—aristocrats, Jews, the bourgeoisie. In fact, what motivated the spectacle was exactly the knowledge that the victims were people, and capable of feeling pain and fear as people do. We don’t humiliate vermin, or put them through show trials, or make them watch their fellow-vermin die first. The myth of mechanical murder is almost always only that. (If one good thing emerged from Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” it was the demonstration that, contra Hannah Arendt, the actions of the Nazi murderers were not detached and bureaucratic but actively sadistic and cruel.) The night before their execution, the victims, understanding that the purpose of the spectacle was to degrade them by an elaborate theatre of power and powerlessness, rehearsed the routine of their death in order not to break down on the scaffold.
By the summer of 1793, the madness was so evident that even a member of the Convention had to wonder whether he would be next. Andress makes the good point that the Jacobin terroristes remained idealistic and argumentative even to the end. Robespierre and Saint-Just, instead of arming their own militia, as they might well have done—they started a military academy—went on perorating, until, on July 27, 1794, the members of the Convention turned on them, out of fear for their own necks. Enough of the soldiers, surprisingly, turned with them, and Robespierre, his brother, and Saint-Just all went to the guillotine the next day. The crowd cheered their deaths, too. Soon a new terror of reprisals was launched, by the Gilded Youth, a band of royalist thugs.
Scurr ends her book with a hard-edged survey of Robespierre’s stoical last hours. Andress ends his with a comparison between the Reign of Terror and our own “war on terror,” even though our use of state violence to stop terror is more like one of the overreactions of the ancien régime than like anything that he has described. The terror of the state and the panic that terrorism of the late-nineteenth-century anarchist kind puts into the state are simply different things, allied only by a word. More persuasive is Andress’s attempt to release the Revolution, and the Terror, from the hold of the Burkean critique of rationalism. It was not an excess of encyclopedias that moved the murderers.
Even if we accept that the revolutionaries were not the only bloody-minded madmen in Europe, do we end our reading with a new sense of proportion? Whatever academic scholarship may insist, surely a sense of proportion is the last thing we want from history—perspective, certainly, but not proportion. Anything, after all, can be seen in proportion, shown to be no worse a crime than some other thing. Time and distance can’t help but give us a sense of proportion: it was long ago and far away and so what? What the great historians give us, instead, is a renewed sense of sorrow and anger and pity for history’s victims—for some luckless middle-aged Frenchman standing in the cold gray, shivering as he watches the members of his family being tied up and having their heads cut off. Read Gibbon on the destruction of the Alexandria library by the Christians, or E. P. Thompson on the Luddites—not to mention Robert Conquest on the Gulag—and suddenly old murders matter again; the glory of the work of these historians is that the right of the dead to have their pain and suffering taken seriously is being honored. It is not for history to supply us with a sense of history. Life always supplies us with a sense of history. It is for history to supply us with a sense of life.
Or death. For there is something new in the Reign of Terror, and that is its absolutism. You couldn’t escape it. In the old regime, if you were determined to stay out of politics, politics could stay out of you. In revolutionary France, the modern development was that you could not withdraw, or go into self-exile—you could not even repent or adopt the other religion. You could only wait and hope not to die. When the Abbé Sieyès, asked what he had done during the Terror, answered, “I lived,” he was making more than a mordant joke; he was identifying the new thing that had come into the world, which was a will to killing that made merely living achievement enough.
The bloodlust of the time makes the attempt to trace the Terror to any single intellectual source, or peculiar circumstance—to Enlightenment rationalism gone mad, or to the paranoia of the encircled Republicans—feel inadequate to the Terror’s essential nature, which was that it didn’t matter what the ideology was. The argument that a taste for the ideal and the tabula rasa leads to terror, after all, would be more convincing if its opposite—a desire for an organic, authentic, traditional society—didn’t lead to terror, too. The Red Terror led to a White Terror; Robespierre’s head had hardly fallen before the Gilded Youth were attacking the now helpless Jacobins. It sometimes seems as if history had deliberately placed Hitler and Stalin side by side at the climax of the horror of modern history simply to demonstrate that the road to Hell is paved with any intention you like; a planned, pseudo-rationalist utopianism and an organic, racial, backward-looking Romanticism ended up with the same camps and the same carnage. The historical lesson of the first Terror is not that reason devours its own but that reason cannot stop us from devouring each other.

HOLIDAY WEEKEND

It's the first weekend of Summer ( well, late Spring if you must). So, take some time...at the beach, if you can, and reflect.

FATHER JOE

To those of you unfamiliar with this wonderful book, I strongly recommend it. Every once in a while we all need the kind of validation Father Joe brings to Tony Hendra. See this review by Andrew Sullivan from the NYTimes of a couple of years ago. It may bring back the old Beatles classic, "All You Need is Love".

The Saint and the Satirist



Saints are perhaps always best evoked by sinners. And it would be hard to think of someone more at ease in the world of modern sin than Tony Hendra. He is and has been a brilliant satirist, an alum of National Lampoon in its glory days, an architect of the peerless parody rock documentary, ''This Is Spinal Tap,'' a man who has known (and tells us of) serial sex and drugs and rock and irony. But this extraordinary, luminescent, profound book shows us something wonderfully unexpected and deeply true. These ideas of sin that we have are not really sin. Or rather: they are the symptoms of sin, not its essence. And its essence is our withdrawal -- our willful withdrawal -- from God's love. This book is about Hendra's slow, aching, hilarious but profound attempt to accept God's unconditional love for him. And this truly difficult acceptance is a consequence of one other man's quiet listening and faith. Of another's love.
That other man was the Rev. Joseph Warrilow, an English Benedictine monk, who spent almost his entire life in a monastery on the Isle of Wight, off England's southern coast. Hendra stumbled across Father Joe almost by accident. At the age of 14, Hendra had befriended an odd married couple near his hometown in Hertfordshire, north of London. The man was a hyperstrict Roman Catholic convert, the wife a lonely woman who came to fall for the awkward adolescent. Over several encounters, her passion unfolded, and the teenage boy found himself kissing and then, finally, fondling a married woman. That was when her husband caught them, and, as a consequence, whisked the miscreant teenager off to a monastery for spiritual discipline.
Young Tony was prepared for the worst. But he found something else. The old monk who turned up in his tiny visitor's cell is cartoonish in appearance -- big flat feet in sandals, ''big pink hands like rock lobsters sticking out from frayed black cuffs. . . . A fleshy triangular nose . . . gigantic ears, wings of gristle, at right angles to the rather pointy close-shaven skull. The long rubbery lips were stretched in the goofiest of grins.'' But this almost comic figure immediately shocks. Hendra kneels for confession:
'' 'No no no no,' said Father Joseph Warrilow 17 times. 'Sit down next to me. . . .' I sat down. Without looking at me he took my hand in his -- big, surprisingly soft -- and held it on the arm of the chair. His long mobile lips pursed and unpursed several times; he blinked rapidly until finally his eyes closed. Evidently it was his way of concentrating his energies. His hand relaxed slightly over mine and I began to feel its warmth. . . . A calm suffused me, a physical sensation running through my body like a hot drink on a cold night. For the first time in a week, all my fears melted away. 'Now, dear,' he said, eyes still closed, 'tell me everything.' ''

9/11

The Telegraph today published the news that its front page -- on the 9/11 attacks -- was voted the best front page of the last one-hundred years. Would this also be the most newsworthy story of that period. I just think it might if the full implications and consequences are taken into account. Take a look, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?xml=/global/2006/05/26/npage26.xml&DCMP=EMC-exp_26052006

BEAR in the WOODS

IF YOU meet a bear in the woods, try not to panic or scream; on no account should you turn your back and run. As markets around the world have turned grizzly over the past two weeks, some investors seem to have forgotten the old hikers' maxim. After three years of big gains, many stockmarkets have tumbled by 10% or more in less than ten days. The loudest growls have echoed around emerging markets and commodities. Europe has surrendered most of this year's gains. Americans have so far escaped lightly, but they would be unwise to take comfort. Their housing market, the recent rock of their economy, is where a much grizzlier creature lies in wait.

Most investors tend to look first at equity markets—and they have certainly had a good run virtually everywhere. Yet a repeat of the slump after the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2001-02 remains highly unlikely. In 2000 shares were wildly overvalued. Today price/earnings ratios in most stockmarkets are near, if not below, their long-term averages. This suggests that the slide in shares could be short-lived.



So what has caused this burst of volatility? One popular explanation conjures up fears of rising inflation and hence higher interest rates. Yet this sits oddly with the fall in bond yields and the gold price over the past week: if inflation were the culprit, you would expect both to have risen. The real puzzle is not why volatility has suddenly increased, but why it had been so low in the past year or so. The answer seems to be an abundance of cheap money, which lured investors into complacency. Now they are starting to demand higher returns on riskier assets. Emerging-market equities and metals, not (generally safer) bonds, suffered the biggest mauling in the past week. It could be a healthy correction.

A formidable machine

Indeed, the recent jitters need not harm the world economy, which even bears admit has performed stunningly. World GDP has grown at an annualised rate of more than 4% for 11 consecutive quarters. This is the strongest upturn for more than 30 years. Yet global inflation remains historically low. Strong growth with mild inflation is all the more amazing given the tripling of oil prices since 2003. Past oil-price shocks have caused stagflation.
The world has so far shrugged off higher oil prices with the help of two powerful economic forces. The first is the opening up and integration into the world economy of China, India and other emerging economies. This has given the biggest boost to global supply since the industrial revolution. Their cheap labour has cut the cost of goods. The threat that jobs in rich economies could move offshore has helped hold down wages. Although demand from emerging economies has fuelled the surge in oil and commodity prices, the newcomers' overall effect has been to curb inflation in the rich world.

That, in turn, has magnified the second stimulus. Since the bursting of the dotcom bubble, central banks have pumped out cheap money. In 2003 average short-term interest rates in the G7 economies fell to their lowest in recorded history. Because inflation remained low, the central banks have been slow to mop up the excess liquidity. Cheap money has encouraged households, especially American ones, to borrow and spend lavishly. It is not just house prices that have surged ahead; cheap money has encouraged investors across the world to take bigger risks, creating several smaller bubbles. Together the huge boost to supply (from emerging economies) and the huge boost to demand (from easy money) have offset the burden of higher oil prices, creating the once-impossible combination of robust growth and modest inflation.

The era of cheap money is nearing an end. For the first time in 15 years, the three big central banks are now all tightening monetary policy. The European Central Bank has already followed the Federal Reserve's lead in raising interest rates; the Bank of Japan has stopped printing lots of money and will start lifting rates soon. Only now are the markets realising that interest rates may rise by more than they had expected. In the long term, rates should be roughly equal to nominal GDP growth, but in America and elsewhere they are still well below it. Optimists argue that America's economy is coping well with rising interest rates, but it hasn't really sniffed tight money yet. Without easy credit, dear oil will cause more pain.
Until recently, financial markets appeared to be betting that the Goldilocks economy—neither too hot, nor too cold—was safe from the bears. The rattled markets are a reminder that sooner or later growth will slow or inflation will rise. Inflation is not about to spiral upwards but with diminishing spare capacity, it could edge up. America has an extra risk because Wall Street suspects that Ben Bernanke, the Fed's new chairman, may be a soft touch on inflation. If that suspicion persists, he will need to raise interest rates by more than otherwise—or investors will do the tightening for him by pushing up bond yields. That would make other assets look expensive.
It is in the American housing market that the bear may growl loudest. By borrowing against the surging prices of their homes, American consumers have been able to keep on spending. The housing market is already coming off the boil. If prices merely flatten, the economy could slow sharply as consumer spending and construction are squeezed. If house prices fall as a result of higher bond yields, the American economy could even dip into recession. Less spending and more saving is just what America needs to reduce its current-account deficit, but for American households used to years of plenty it will hurt.
For the world, it is best that America slows today. Later, imbalances will loom even larger. A few years ago, Japan and the euro-area economies were flat on their backs. Now they are growing “above trend”, so the world depends less on America than it once did. The boost to the world economy from China and India will last into the future, even allowing for mishaps. Wise investors should resist the urge to flee, reduce their holdings of risky assets and stare down the bear.

SYMPHONIES

Future of the Orchestra Does the orchestra have a future in the United States? Kurt Andersen and his guest, writer and composer Greg Sandow, ask what needs to change in order for orchestras to survive. by Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen: This is Studio 360 from WNYC in New York and Public Radio International. I’m Kurt Andersen. In 1842 a small group of musicians formed the Philharmonic Society of New York and opened their first concert with these familiar notes. (music) It was the first professional orchestra in the new world. The New York Tribune later wrote, "The musicians almost went wild with delight. They threw themselves into each other’s arms, laughing, weeping and applauding in a breath. The effect on the public was similar. The enthusiasm was indescribable."
Fast forward a century and a half. The country’s first orchestra is still going strong today as the New York Philharmonic and symphonies in Philadelphia, Chicago and other big cities are selling tickets sometimes at record levels. But no orchestra manager in America right now is likely to feel very comfortable because over the past couple of years especially in communities all across the country, a pretty grim trend has emerged. Just look at the newspapers.
The Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, the largest performing arts organization in the state, announced Friday the firing of all its musicians.
The New York Chamber Symphony has cancelled its upcoming season.
Earlier this year, the 49-year-old Savannah Symphony Orchestra called off the rest of its season.
Does the orchestra have a future in the United States? Today in Studio 360, we’ll ask that question and more of musicians, audiences and some of the country’s leading conductors. San Francisco’s meistro Michael Tilson Thomas will reveal one way he is building new audiences.
Michael Tilson Thomas Clip: This is also, I have to tell you, my dog Shana’s favorite piece of music.
KA: And some members of the current New York Philharmonic deconstruct the power of 100 instruments playing together.
NY Philharmonic clip: Ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba – I have to play it as if it was a sentence or as if I was saying something and be aware of what’s happening in the orchestra, weave with them...
KA: My guest to talk about all this is Greg Sandow who reviews classical music for The Wall Street Journal, who composes, and faces audiences in his concert series called Symphony with a Splash, with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Greg Sandow, welcome to Studio 360.
Greg Sandow: Kurt, I’m happy to be here.
KA: Now, tell us about what you do with your Symphony with a Flash concerts. From looking at your website it looks fairly mad.
GS: Well, it could probably be madder. I think it’s very nice of you to make it so. Just to be brief about it, most orchestras are trying to reach a new audience. They devise a new kind of concert. In Pittsburgh, the idea is that we play shorter selections and we talk to them. We try not to dumb it down. We try to keep it serious, we also try to have fun. We succeed. And I think one of the best things I did was roll back the clock to the 18th century. I loved that quote you read about the first performance of the New York Philharmonic, and of course I’m probably not the only one who thought, oh, why can’t it be like that now? So you go back in history, you discover that in those days, people in the audience applauded the moment they heard anything they liked, like you hear a solo in a jazz club, you clap. So Mozart left a letter about the premier of his Paris symphony in which not only did he describe that happen, but said how he bought into it. You know, he said – he’s writing to his father – Well, Dad, there was one theme I knew they were going to like so I made sure to repeat it and I brought it back at the end and sure enough they clapped. So we did that piece in Pittsburgh and I told the audience, this is what Mozart said happened. Your job is to clap the moment you hear anything you like. And I thought the concert hall was transformed. You don’t maybe want to have that for every piece. You’re doing a very serious slow movement from a Mahler symphony, probably everybody wants to listen to that, but it’s interesting – many straws in this wind — you know if you go back to the great days when classical music started, you don’t find the formality and the iciness that you get today.
KA: So there’s something to learn from, for instance, the spectacle of the Rolling Stones playing Brown Sugar or Street Fighting Man and having the audience go crazy.
GS: Oh, absolutely, and since you mentioned the Rolling Stones, one of the most interesting facts about the orchestra world today is that orchestra musicians are now younger than their audience. Fascinating. It shows there’s no shortage of young people who want to play classical music, though there appears to be a shortage of people who want to listen. But when the Rolling Stones came to Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a sassy little box in the arts section showing that the Philadelphia Orchestra was younger on the average than the Stones.
KA: That wouldn’t be hard.
GS: Yeah, right, but maybe they haven’t learned the lesson completely of their youth.
KA: So do you try to have fun at these concerts? I understand drinks are served.
GS: Well, yeah, they have jazz and drinks and food in the lobby beforehand and we absolutely try to have fun. We crack jokes. In the future, we’ll probably get the orchestra musicians to carry on. The conductor talks and the audience is tremendously responsive, not just to the jokes but also to the music. When they clapped for Mozart, I was fascinated by how different their applause was at different moments. It was far from random.
KA: What do you personally love about orchestral music?
GS: Well, two things about orchestral music. There is just the sheer power and variety of an orchestra. When all of these people cooperating start moving together, it can be just exhilarating, it can just sweep you out of your seat. Plus the sheer volume and variety of the sound is something... but then about classical music in general, this is to music what a novel and a film are. It’s art that goes somewhere over time. A thought is developed. You are not at the same place at the end where you start. It’s amazing to me that this is kind of dying out in music, that people who are graduate students in English literature don’t understand the power of that anymore, although their pop music taste is fabulous.
KA: And were you always a big classical music fan or did you come to this as an adult?
GS: I was brought up in it, which does seem to be one of the useful prerequisites for being hopelessly in love with it. I came from a family actually where I had to learn about pop music on my own. So I’ll tell you one little seminal experience and in a way, purists would say it’s very primitive, but I heard the Mahler Second Symphony –this is an awe-encompassing piece that shakes the heavens (music) and I had never heard anything like it, and people didn’t know the music back then, so it’s a revelation for everybody in Carnegie Hall where they played that. And in the last movement, Mahler striving, reaching to do everything he can possibly do to pile on the effect he wants, he has the tympani play a scale. And at that point, I was reading orchestral scores of Beethoven and Brahms so the tympani would play two notes the way the New York Philharmonic guy did in the segment that you played before, but to see one timpanist with drums all around him, playing an actual scale on it, this flipped me out. I’d never heard or dreamed of anything like that.
KA: The conductor Daniel Barenboim tries to give people in his audiences those flip-out experiences. He leads the Chicago Symphony and back in February, he surprised Chicago and everybody in classical music I think when he announced that he was going to step down as conductor two years from now. At the time he said he could just no longer deal with all the non-conducting duties that he’d been given, like fund raising, and he said that it’s not just the orchestra that’s in trouble but all of classical music.
DB: One talks about the audience. Why audience? Not long ago, I made a speech and everybody laughed at what I said, but it’s actually very sad. Just imagine somebody being born in the Chicago area, in a middle class family, neither of his parents play any instrument, they don’t go to concerts, there is no record – they don’t hear any music. The child goes to kindergarten, has no idea of music. Goes to school, primary school, high school, nothing. It’s just not part of his life. He goes to university, gets a degree, becomes a lawyer or a doctor, whatever, comes back to Chicago. Now he’s 33 or 34 and he is one of the most successful lawyers or doctors in town. And he goes to dinner, to a wonderful restaurant, one good restaurant in town, with friends and somebody says hey, have you been to the Chicago Symphony? He says, Chicago Symphony? No. Oh, you should go, it’s the greatest orchestra in the world! Really? Yeah. And besides it would be good for you to be seen there. You know it’s really very good. And this guy has the misfortune to come on a Thursday when I conduct a symphony of Bruckner or Mahler. (music) What can he get out of it? This is the problem. The problem is not the audience. The problem is not what they write in the newspapers. You know, the radio stations or the records... the problem is that our society has neglected music as an integral part of society and this for at least half a century. (music) You know people think of music as something completely outside their lives. They don’t see any relation between music and painting or music and literature, or music and politics or music and human feeling and this is the problem. The real problem is this, and we are never ever going to cure the illness because we’re only treating the symptoms. The real problem is how to get music education to really be installed in the school and therefore make music part of the society.
KA: Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, who’s been principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony for 15 years and will be quitting in 2006. I’m Kurt Andersen in Studio 360 today with Greg Sandow who reviews classical music for The Wall Street Journal among many other classical music endeavors. We’re talking about the future of the orchestra. And Greg, what do you think about what Daniel Barenboim said, and the challenge to music.
GS: Well, people wonder why classical music is in trouble. Daniel... I just would like to shake him. He ought to go and do some community outreach because then he would discover the things he left out of that lawyer’s biography, the bands he played in in high school, his fabulous collection of Bob Dylan bootlegs, his guitar on which he plays blues to this day, his great connoisseurship of Miles Davis. It’s ridiculous. And the idea that he’s going to come and he should get into a Bruckner symphony which after all was written well over 100 years ago – why exactly is this person supposed to devote more than an hour of his life in deep contemplation from something in the 19th century? Now, maybe he should do that occasionally but for that to be a central activity – there’s something a little weird about that. If Daniel had said, okay, 20th century something, or 21st century something, something that actually sounds like the America we live in today, which by the way is not the new music that Barenboim chooses to play, although such new music does exist, then we would have something to talk about. But if Barenboim thinks that this person he invented has some weird difficult-to-explain gap which has to be fixed by, excuse me, brainwashing in school, I would say that Barenboim also has a gap in that he has no idea of what the real musical life is, not just of America which is one of his many countries, but all the countries in Europe that he lives in and Israel for that matter, his home country.
KA: So the idea that we’ve had for certainly the last 100 years of this classical repertory, and by God and our grandparents and our parents, these are the pieces of music that’s important to know, to listen to, we should just let that fly out of the window and adapt to new times?
GS: No, I don’t think that we should let it fly out the window. Just for example, you have people who are passionate about Jane Austen, people passionate – this is dating me, but in the ‘50s everybody was into Dostoyevsky. So there are musical equivalents of these things. I don’t think that culture should die, but I think that it should take its place in some sort of classical music culture of today. Why are they playing the old stuff? There are routine ways to put together programs, you see them a lot. The same collection of masterpieces gets recycled over and over again. Why? They’re unable to say at this point, which I don’t think would be the case, let’s say, of a book group reading Jane Austen. They could probably talk you under the table with what they get out of it, and the classical music world is not finding ways to do that for Mozart and Beethoven and Bruckner.
KA: Is that changing? Are there places where it’s beginning to work? I mean the effort to make programming more eclectic and understand that there are those who want to read – want to listen to Mozart and Bach but there are also those who want to listen to Kernis and...
GS: I would say along with many people that the San Francisco Symphony is one of the places and ...
KA: That’s Michael Tilson Thomas?
GS: Michael Tilson Thomas and also the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I’ve also heard the former executive director of the San Francisco Symphony warn against doing too much of that, that a certain part of the audience just wants to hear the old masterpieces over and over again. That is a bind that classical music gets in. I can just say this in two ways. Number one, basically you are selling your tickets and raising your money from people who like it the old way. They may be diminishing. There may be fewer tickets sold. There may be less money raised. It’s still the biggest chunk so you can’t eliminate that entirely. Number two, and this is a little scary, all the surveys that have been done recently about the orchestral audience show that people go there for a vague but very powerful sense of inspiration, very spiritual, very uplifting. It doesn’t seem to matter exactly what music is played, as long as it’s not unpleasant. Alex Ross did a fabulous piece in The New Yorker in February about the state of classical music and its future and one of his premises was that classical music is not refined and is not civilized. That some of it is vulgar and some of it is insane and some of it hits you over the head, as all great art does. A radio classical music host in Madison, Wisconsin, for Wisconsin public radio e-mailed me back and forth about some issues in the field, including Alex’s piece that she said she wanted to have a T-shirt made: I don’t listen to classical music to be civilized. So, you know, one of the things we’re doing next year in Pittsburgh is we’re doing a program of composers who were crazy and one of them is going to be Beethoven and we’re going to take the last movement of the Seventh Symphony at an absolutely impossible speed, just to show that Beethoven went over the edge sometimes.

FREUD at 150

Anyone who has undergone traditional psychoanalysis will know that it is not about finding a cure for an illness, or even relieving the symptoms of one. In this occasionally marvellous, often painful, and sometimes absurd enterprise, the analyst—whether Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, or Lacanian—does not tell you what it is that you've got, nor does he or she explain how you will get over it. Instead, you embark on a personal exploration during which you find that you don't only suffer from the symptoms you thought you did, but also a range of other conflicts underlying them. The process is classically driven by two mechanisms, and these are essentially all there is to the technique (though not, of course, the theory) pioneered by Freud.The first is "free association," which means that you say whatever comes into your head during regular, 50-minute sessions—taking place two to five times a week over a period of months and years—revealing themes, links and patterns in your psychology of which you were previously unaware. The second is the "transference," which is what takes place between you and the analyst as you become embroiled in an intimate relationship that is unlike any other you might have outside the consulting room (though it may substitute for an inadequate or absent one). The principle that the relationship is what does the therapeutic work is fundamental to all the so-called "psychodynamic" therapies to have grown out of the Freudian tradition. If the analysis is successful, the outcome of that relationship will change something in your life for the better. Your symptoms will retreat back into deeper conflicts, which you come to accept as the price of being alive. Psychoanalysis is hardly redemptive, and never promised to be. When early patients of Freud's complained to him that nothing could change the original circumstances which made them unhappy, he agreed—with a caveat: "Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness." This is one of Freud's most celebrated remarks, though it appears in Studies in Hysteria, which was published in 1895, before he had developed the full psychoanalytic method. But it captures the pessimism—or realism—which threads its way through all Freudian practice. It is one of the peculiar fascinations of psychoanalysis that a method seized upon by so many in the search for self-transcendence should have sprung from a man so captivated by the irredeemability of human nature."The crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights," Janet Malcolm wrote in the New Yorker in 1983. "To make the unconscious conscious—the programme of psychoanalytic therapy—is to pour water into a sieve. The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of the analysis." Malcolm was not one of psychoanalysis's detractors. Far from discrediting it, her aim had been to distinguish charlatanism from genuine practice. But American psychoanalysis had by that time reached its baroque period, and was ripe for pillorying. A decade later, the Berkeley English professor Frederick Crews delivered the coup-de-grâce in the New York Review of Books with an essay which still stands as one of the most unflinching executions to have been performed on Freudian practice, theory and scientific pretensions. The seriousness with which disputes over psychoanalysis were being conducted in the 1980s seems to belong to another age, especially in Britain where it has withered more than in either America or continental Europe. The 150th anniversary of Freud's birth has just passed here with low-key, often confused acknowledgment. Part of the confusion arises from the fact that Freudian terminology and concepts remain so ingrained in the wider language. But it is important not to confuse the extravagant mythopoetics of Freudian theory with the rather modest practice of psychoanalysis. Lengthy, complex and expensive, it is conducted mostly in private practices and, in Britain, is confined largely to London. Around 250 accredited psychoanalysts work in the NHS, along with counsellors, art and drama therapists, consultant psychotherapists, and other psychodynamically inclined practitioners. But as a feature of public health in this country, psychoanalysis in its pure form is almost non-existent. It is hard to argue that such an uneconomic method, which makes such conditional claims for what it can achieve, should play much of a part in the big problems facing the NHS in treating mental illness.So we are left with a vague impression that, while the practice is impractical, the theory still contains a blueprint of how the mind works. Perhaps Freud was similar to Darwin (whom he admired), providing a model which would later be refined by scientific developments. In fact, the better analogy may be with Marx (whom he did not admire)—hugely influential in the 20th century, but with little evidence for his "scientific" theories. The whole scheme of both Freudian theory and practice was left to its own internal disputes through most of the last century. There was the split with Jung and Adler over childhood sexuality, and after Freud's death the argument between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein over the relative significance of the mother and father, but there was limited interaction with other scientific disciplines. And while developments in genetics advanced the Darwinian cause, they did the opposite to the Freudian one. They lent new impetus to the long-established tradition in medical psychiatry of searching for the biological bases of mental illnesses. Meanwhile, from the 1950s, pharmacological developments—principally antipsychotics, tricyclic antidepressants, and the rediscovery of lithium—had provided the biggest breakthrough in managing the symptoms of severe mental illness in history, dramatically reducing the populations in mental hospitals. Pharmacological successes were largely a process of containment rather than cure. But they clearly established the biochemical component in severe mental illness, and from the 1980s and 1990s, idealistic hopes grew for identifying the genetic origins of conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (manic depression). Freud did not claim that psychoanalysis was capable of treating profound or psychotic mental illnesses, and he never denied that the foundations of human psychology were material and biological. But a genetics of the human mind—which viewed madness as the downstream biological effect of a genetic disorder—threatened to flood into even the areas he did consider to be available to therapeutic intervention. More damaging still for the Freudians were the increasingly detailed and sophisticated classifications of mental illnesses, which completely re-categorised the hysterical or neurotic symptoms that Freud had observed and attempted to explain. In 1980, in a dramatic move that sent shocks of both glee and horror through American psychiatry, the word "neurosis" was struck out of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—never to return. The American bible of psychiatric diagnosis had effectively declared that the key mental phenomenon on which Freud based his ideas did not exist.And if the news from biologically-inclined psychiatry looked bad for Freudian theory, the message from neuroscience was worse. The 1990s was the decade of the brain. Language, memory and voluntary action had been mapped out in their particular locations. With the discovery of functional neuroimaging, an increasing number of mental operations could be watched in real time. Motivational and emotional states were shown to have a specific underlying brain circuitry. We began to learn about what happens in the pre-frontal cortex, the hippocampus and the amygdala, and there didn't appear to be any particularly useful correlation with an id, ego or superego.And what of the unconscious, and the mechanism of repression? Without these, there can surely be nothing foundational left in the Freudian system. What we know for certain is that most of the brain is not conscious; but this does not mean that the subconscious pathways of cognitive science amount to the same dynamic region of conflicting desires that Freud postulated. It simply tells us the obvious, that the brain conducts most of its operations without our being aware of them. The non-conscious mind may even have turned out to be less of a mystery than the conscious one. It is consciousness that cognitive scientists find hardest to locate rather than what lies beneath it. And if we want myths to explain our strange drives, we can as well go to the evolutionary psychologists for their tales of prehistoric survival strategies as to Freud for his psychosexual dramas.Even the idea of repression, the last stronghold of Freudianism, has been dismantled over the last 30 years. After a shock or trauma, someone may be unable to process a memory, which gets blocked, or comes back in nightmare or flashback form. But this may be understood as the brain's failure to process terrible events, rather than the repression of forbidden desire under the strains of civilisation. Freud's model of repression emerged not just out of 19th-century Viennese society, but out of the age of the steam train. Science is always hypothesised through the metaphors of the day. Freud viewed man as being under pressure from his inner furnace, blowing off steam. Now, we are more likely to imagine ourselves like the interspersing windows of a computer screen, in which operations take place simultaneously and the hard drive of our brains runs the software of our psychology.No one has fully explained the great riddle of how flesh became thought, but it is now perfectly possible to piece together a working model of the mind from neuroscience and cognitive psychology that contains no oedipal conflict, no thanatos or eros, no pleasure principle, no ego and—decisively—no unconscious. We may be emotionally attached to some of these ideas but, scientifically speaking, we don't need them. Does this mean that the big dream of the talking cure inspired by Freud has been swept aside by a biology of the mind? Far from it. Despite the development of increasingly refined pharmacological treatments, new drugs do not work much better than the old ones. At the front line of psychotic disorders, the beneficial effects of medication are often accompanied by devastating side-effects. Having made its big pharmacological leap, psychiatry remains largely a process of diagnosis, risk assessment, containment and care. Almost nothing has yet come of the great hope of the 1990s that—as with Huntingdon's and Alzheimer's disease—the genetic sources of mental illness would be revealed. For the moment, the big themes of mental illness have been distilled into "gene-environment interaction," the old question of how a person's life-circumstances trigger and shape his biological predispositions, and vice versa.There is one model of the mind, however, complete with its own particular brand of therapy, which has been gaining a slow ascendancy over the last 30 years. Cognitive psychology has suffered from few of the problems that Freudian theory faced as it confronted developments in biological psychiatry, genetics and neuroscience. Observational and experimental by habit, it is the relatively new science of cognition—the mental functioning that processes information—and since its inception in the late 1950s it has increasingly integrated itself with neurobiological and computer-oriented conceptions of the mind.And the talking therapy which came out of cognitivism—cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)—now has more research poured into it on both sides of the Atlantic than any other in history. The drops on the surface of the CBT mesh appear to be swelling. "It works," is the mantra you will hear practitioners repeat with a cool certainty that is quite distinct in tone from the old fervour of the Freudians. Not that "working" means the same as "curing." More specifically, CBT has done what no other therapy has managed to achieve to the same degree, which is to dev-elop an empirically grounded method and a base of evidence to show that it is distinctively effective. And, unlike traditional psychoanalysis—based principally on theory, authority and patient anecdote—CBT is able to claim that it is scientifically testable.Aaron T Beck, the father and architect of cognitive therapy, made his own personal break with the Freudian tradition unintentionally. Beck was an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School when, in 1959, he began to conduct some modest research into psychoanalysis. Having completed a fellowship at the Austen Riggs Centre in Massachusetts (which, today, is the only authentic psychoanalytic hospital in America), Beck wanted to provide proper evidence for Freudian ideas—to convince "hard-headed" psychologists. So he focused his research on an area of psychoanalysis with which everyone was familiar: dream analysis. The hypothesis he tested was the basic one that depression is caused by inverted hostility: aggression unconsciously turned against oneself. The Freudian assumption behind this was that the type of thought that takes place in dreams must be qualitatively different from that of waking consciousness—because dreams reflected unconscious motives.But the more Beck examined patient responses, the more something obvious began to dawn on him. Most of his depressed patients were not actively seeking failure, either consciously or unconsciously. The dreams themselves seemed merely to confirm what the patients said when they were awake. Perhaps, Beck reflected, there was a simpler explanation: "that the person sees himself as a loser in the dream because he ordinarily sees himself as a loser." With this little shift in perspective, Beck began to take a path away from the entire model of the Freudian unconscious, with all its motivational and instinctual drives, towards one in which the conscious mind was the key. As he told the British psychologist Paul Salkovskis in 1990: "If you take motivation and wish fulfilment out of the dream, this undermines the whole motivational model of psychoanalysis. I started looking at the model all the way through, and… it did not hold. Once I inserted the cognitive model, I saw no need for the rest of the superstructure of psychoanalytic thinking."In its place, Beck developed a form of therapy that directly addressed the thoughts and beliefs that patients had about themselves, viewing disorders of mood as a by-product of dysfunctional thinking. In CBT, there are no thanatos and eros battling it out, just negative and positive cognition. Out of Freud's fatalistic view of human nature, Beck stepped forward with optimistic rationalism. He viewed depression as principally a cognitive distortion, and treated it by getting patients to reorganise their routines, reprocess their memories, restructure their thinking and challenge their negative beliefs about themselves.In Beck's "schema," behaviour, cognition and mood are intimately associated, and each can affect the other. Even where the biological component of a mental illness is evident, CBT looks to ameliorate the dysfunctional thinking that goes with that, and thus perhaps also alleviate the underlying biochemical disorder. As Cory Newman, director of the Centre for Cognitive Therapy in Philadelphia, says: "If medication works bottom up, CBT works top down." It is a method that proceeds by observation and experiment. Since Beck's pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s, CBT has developed slowly but surely, building up a portfolio of disorders for which it is effective, and for which it has evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness—principally anxiety, depression, trauma, obsessive compulsive behaviour and eating disorders.The basic tool of CBT research is the same as that applied to the testing of new drugs—the randomised controlled trial (RCT). This means that a particular therapy for a particular disorder may be tested against both other treatments (drugs, or another type of therapeutic treatment) and a placebo (no significant treatment). Hundreds of large-scale RCTs in Britain and America have, since the 1980s, increasingly shown not only that CBT has a high success rate among the less severe mental disorders but also that it can sometimes be a useful complement for the treatment of major psychotic illnesses, when applied in conjunction with medication.So what happens when the door closes and you are alone with the cognitive therapist? For a start, there is no couch. You and the therapist sit opposite each other, and the therapist will be explicit about what he or she is trying to do. First a questionnaire will be filled in, and you will be assigned a score, indicating the severity of your condition and providing the basis against which any improvements will subsequently be measured. The therapist may provide a thumbnail sketch of how emotional and rational parts of the brain work, to give you a sense of an explanatory theory behind the therapy. In order to establish your personal history, there will be a process of what is known as "Socratic" questioning—not so much an intellectual pursuit of truth as a way of establishing how you think about yourself. A technique called "down arrowing" may be used to test your beliefs. If you have panic attacks, you may be asked to consider which thoughts trigger the attacks, and consider whether these thoughts make sense. If you can down-arrow to "core beliefs"—seen as underlying mood states—you may be able to change a feature of your thinking which automatically comes up with a self-critical belief such as, "I am a bad person." If you cease to think you are a bad person, your distress should be alleviated. Approaches differ for different disorders. If you have lived through a traumatic event, with subsequent memory loss, you will be asked to describe as much as possible in order to "re-process" the experience. A great deal depends on the skill of the therapist, of course, but it is meant to be a technique in which therapists can be systematically trained.Sessions will most likely take place once a week, with homework exercises, such as writing a "thought diary," to perform in between. Cognitive therapy does not have to be long and laborious, and it does not have to delve into the dungeon of childhood memory. Twelve or 16 sessions are now considered sufficient to help with the average depression. A good relationship between the therapist and the patient is considered vital, but only so that the therapy can be effectively implemented. Cognitive therapists talk about a doctor-patient "alliance." There is no need to get embroiled in a murky, Freudian "transference."Cognitive behaviour therapy is now the best-researched, most medically accepted talking cure in the western world. Efficient, easily teachable and scientifically testable—it is easy to see the appeal of it for a large, cash-strapped system like the NHS. One of the curiosities of cognitive therapy is that while it was developed in America, the place it has really taken off is Britain. In the US it competes within an open market of other therapies, including the psychodynamic ones which inherit the Freudian tradition. In Britain it has become academic orthodoxy.The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), which independently assesses findings from research and recommends treatments, now states in its guidelines that CBT should be available as an option for almost all mental disorders. CBT is still a "hard to get" therapy, with waiting lists of up to nine months. But cognitive therapists now constitute the biggest single group of psychotherapists in the NHS, and this is just the beginning. For some time now, Richard Layard, the economist and Labour peer, has been arguing we should train 10,000 further therapists in CBT. He points out that there are 3.5m people in Britain suffering from mental health problems, and 1m of them receiving incapacity benefits. The cost of training and employing therapists, Layard argues, would not only reduce the £10bn cost of the benefits, but offset the cost of prescribing antidepressant medication, provide better long-term outcomes for patients and make society happier.The government is listening. Two CBT pilot schemes have been announced by Patricia Hewitt—in Doncaster and Newham, east London. The areas have been chosen partly because of the high proportion of people claiming incapacity benefits, a third of whom are thought to be suffering from depression. These schemes will set out to show that therapy can get people back to work more effectively than medication. If they are successful, there is a good chance that, over the next decade, Layard's dream of a cognitively driven NHS will come to pass, and Britain will be the world's principal incubator of Aaron Beck's method.This is not to be sniffed at. To varying degrees for varying conditions, CBT can be shown to help people. No other form of talking therapy possesses anything like an equivalent base of evidence for this, and clearly a publicly accountable system like the NHS should take it very seriously. Other things besides CBT can help people, however. Some of those who come from the Freud-based psychodynamic traditions argue that where the research is done, they too can demonstrate effectiveness. The most important of such figures is Peter Fonagy, professor of psychoanalysis at UCL and head of the Anna Freud Centre. (See Fonagy's debate with Lewis Wolpert, Prospect November 1999.) Fonagy is viewed by some psychoanalysts as a kind of apostate for abandoning key classifications (he is happy to view the unconscious as just a handy metaphor) and for accepting the idea that psychotherapy should be submitted to the tools of evidence-gathering. But Fonagy's approach is more likely to preserve the life of the Freudian tradition than any other, and his capacity for conducting and assessing research is not questioned, even by the cognitivists.Fonagy has no desire to argue against CBT. He simply maintains that the Freudian tradition provides an alternative means of understanding the effect of the therapeutic relationship and the tragically long-term difficulties of coping with most mental illness and human unhappiness. While the Nice guidelines find favourably for the long-term benefits of CBT, a recent Health Technology Assessment study into the long-term outcomes of cognitive therapy trials in Scotland found the effects of CBT in anxiety disorder being eroded over time, and none of the effects on psychotic illnesses being maintained at all. Fonagy's criticism of cognitive therapy is that it is "marketed as an antibiotic when really it's an aspirin."In one condition—personality disorder—Fonagy provides evidence drawn from meta-analyses of various studies conducted over the last seven years that show psychodynamic therapies doing as well as CBT. But David Clark, professor of psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, points to findings from different comparative studies in the Archives of General Psychiatry that show CBT doing better. How much can definitively be concluded from such studies is far from clear. Freudian therapies are always going to face a handicap in the research race, because what can't be fed into a data set is the "active ingredient" in psychodynamic therapy—the patient-therapist relationship.But even for cognitive therapists, who consider the relationship to be a delivery method rather than an active ingredient, research trials can be more ambivalent than they like to admit. Some critics of the CBT trials have described the process as "garbage in, garbage out—with precision in the middle." In other words, the data generated by the answers to the questionnaire the patient is given before and after therapy may be processed scientifically, but how closely does this data reflect real psychological states? It's the same problem faced by pollsters and social scientists, but the CBT research comes out looking more like medical fact than perhaps it should.What's more clearly telling is that, particularly in personality and bipolar disorder, leading CBT practitioners are quite happy to admit borrowing a few ideas from the old Freudian cellar. In America both Judith Beck (Aaron's daughter, and director of the Beck Institute) and Cory Newman at the Centre for Cognitive Therapy describe how they use some techniques taken from psychodynamic therapy when exploring childhood problems. And even in Britain, a pivotal figure like David Clark at the Institute of Psychiatry, does not rule out the value of other approaches. "Do I think CBT is uniquely the best therapy across all these disorders?" he asks rhetorically. "We don't have the evidence to claim that."Clark cites Aaron Beck's own, half-joking description of CBT as being "whatever works." This suggests the pragmatic, incremental, non-dogmatic, altruistic and scientific side of the new talking cure at its best. It may have plans to roll itself out across Britain and the world, but only if and when "it works." In the meantime, Fonagy and followers will be able to argue that parts of Freudianism work too.The problem with cognitive therapy is not one of method but one of meaning. No one pretends that cognitive therapy has created a wider culture, in the way that psychoanalysis did. CBT is designed to modify the mechanics of the mind—to give people symptom-improvement exercises—not to produce a language of human experience. That constitutes both its achievement and its limitation.As they spread out of the realm of research and development into the wider world, some cognitivists—including the 85-year-old Aaron Beck himself—are keen to give a sense of something deeper at work in the idea. And the place they go for affirmation is, interestingly enough, Buddhism. An idea of "mindfulness" is seen to connect CBT with Buddhist doctrines of acceptance. The cognitive model does not need to postulate an identity-holding ego amid a network of neural processing, and this sits well enough with the Buddhist principle that the self is constituted out of a series of illusions, which may be extinguished on the road to enlightenment.But this fanciful pairing has got nothing to do with the scientific method that cognitivism relies on. It ignores a glaring contradiction that the practice of Buddhism does not encourage talking about your problems. Many ordinary Buddhists hold by a belief that misfortune is accounted for by actions taken in a previous lifetime, and high Buddhist teaching is scarcely similar in tone to the active, positive psychology of the cognitivists. We recently asked the supreme patriarch of Cambodia's Dhammayutta order, His Holiness Bour Kry, what he thought of using western trauma therapies in one of the most psychologically afflicted countries in the world. His response was as follows: "The Buddhist way is not to worry about the past. You have to relax and calm down, don't think about it. In Buddhism, nothing just happens. It's part of karma. In the west you express things more. In Cambodian culture, people keep things inside, they don't talk. It's a different way of doing things. It's not to do with the knowledge of scientists, it's cultural."The culture that has produced the world's top talking cure is western, rational and scientific. And, so long as it is understood where the philosophical parameters lie, it can rightly make claims for being effective. However, what it is structurally incapable of doing is explaining, or describing, the phenomena of experience—whether sane or mad. The set of psychiatric diagnoses that attempt to classify mental illnesses are seen, through the lens of CBT, as a variety of cognitive malfunctions. Its ambition is to improve mental functioning. Anything outside that field is cognitively meaningless.For example, the famous depressions of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill would have to be seen as cognitive problems they had to overcome, rather than agonising yet meaningful states of mind that told them something about the world and shaped their actions as unifier and warrior. Looking at the dreams of Beck's depressed patients, the cognitive therapist must see only positive or negative—functional or dysfunctional—beliefs. This is an advantage if a patient is coming to the therapist simply trying to change the symptoms of his or her illness. It is a difficulty, on the other hand, if the patient needs to understand his or her experience as part of who they are. If a manic depressive is being tormented by religious delusions and comes up with a quotation such as "condemn not, lest ye be condemned," who is more likely to help: the therapist who sees just a dysfunctional belief, or the one who is able to grasp why the patient is using that phrase?Freud's favourite novel was The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky's vision of the inherently perverse, self-destructive drives of human nature made sense to Freud, and he sought to find a language that was commensurate to those urges. He got much of it scientifically wrong, and he famously misinterpreted some of his own patients. But the ambition was to articulate the conflicts to which the human mind is subject, and from which it may never escape. Little may remain of his classifications, or his model of the unconscious, but there are those both inside and outside the psychiatric profession who understand that suffering may contain meaning, and that the relationship between people is the engine of human change; and Freud remains one of their pioneering achievments. (from the June, PROSPECT)